Unenlightened Quotes & Sayings

Major actions by courageous and wise men will be necessary to avoid our continuing to blunder into the space age like unenlightened and selfish idiots. — Fritz Zwicky

The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle to in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Meanwhile, their [evolutionists] unproven theories will continue to be accepted by the learned and the illiterate alike as absolute truth, and will be defended with a frantic intolerance that has a parallel only in the bigotry of the darkest Middle Ages. If one does not accept evolution as an infallible dogma, implicitly and without question, one is regarded as an unenlightened ignoramus or is merely ignored as an obscurantist or a naive, uncritical fundamentalist. — Alfred M. Rehwinkel

I don't know any homophobic people. That suggests fear.
The people I know who hate gay folks are:
illiterate, nescient, uneducated, uninstructed, unlearned, unschooled, untaught, backward, benighted, primitive, unenlightened, blockheaded, dense, doltish, hebetudinous, obtuse, stupid, thickheaded, thick-witted
But not homophobic. — Darnell Lamont Walker

Spirituality authors, who are generally forgiving of most human foibles ... take a hard line on intellectualism ... Skepticism they view with contempt, as the refuge of the unenlightened. — Wendy Kaminer

We unthinkingly build the pilings of our lives upon whatever comes along. Like it or not, we play the hand that fate deals us. If fate is kind, some people credit their fortuitous circumstances to their ingenuity and resoluteness. If fate is cruel, some people curse God. The truth is that an unenlightened person resists suffering, they continually wish for a world different than it is, whereas an enlightened person learns how to suffer heroically. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting Usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity. — James Madison

Earth life is giant field day where we willingly choose the limitation of racing with both feet in a potato sack, or sometimes we join up with another and agree to the limitation of racing as a team where each person has one leg tied to the leg of the other ... Agreeing to run a race with limitations or live a life with limitations doesn't mean you're slow, clumsy, or unenlightened. It just means you're showing up on field day, participating, and if you're really good, you try your best despite the obstacles. — Kaya McLaren

The life of an unenlightened person is filled with suffering. — Frederick Lenz

The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony. — Paul Goodman

Come on, Oliver. I'm saying no."

"Is it a fake no? Because your body keeps saying yes."

"My body doesn't know anything."

"What does your heart say?"

"That's number one on my list of unenlightened organs. It believes anything it hears. It's screwed up in some way. — Elisa Marie Hopkins

Many of us have a tendency to deny any negative feelings. We judge them as "bad" or "unenlightened" when, in fact, they are our stepping stone to enlightenment. Our so-called negative feelings or attitudes are really parts of ourselves that need recognition, love, and healing. Not only is it safe and healthy to acknowledge and accept all of our feelings and beliefs, it is necessary, if we are to get in touch with the fears and pockets of blocked energy that are holding us back from what we want. — Shakti Gawain

Then there was Buddha meddling in, telling all of the Hindu, Hebrew, Christian and Islamic gods and demons that they were nothing more than unenlightened fear induced figments of nirvana-starved mortals. — Andrew James Pritchard

You realized you were surrounded by love, that you were held by love, and that you'd had too small an imagination about that word, that thing. Romantic love, absolutely. Our notion of love - it just seems a very unevolved and very unenlightened notion. That it's this one person who you will meet. Eve Ensler — Krista Tippett

History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ...if you approached the past generously, so to speak - its people as humans, not facts, as modern in their time as we were in ours, who thought and felt as we do, the dead would live again, our equals, not our old-fashioned, hopelessly unenlightened, and backward inferiors. Humanity, to be fully known, had to be seen as changeless as well as ever changing. — Tony Hendra

The teachers of small children are paid more than they were, but still far less than the importance of their work deserves, and they are still regarded by the unenlightened majority as insignificant compared to those who impart information to older children and adolescents, a class of pupils which, in the nature of things, is vastly more able to protect its own individuality from the character of the teacher. — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think religion stops people from thinking. I think it justified crazies. — Bill Maher

Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light. — Matthew Arnold

To be ignorant is to be in the dark;
to be wise is to be in the light.
An illiterate person is disabled intellectually;
an unenlightened person is handicapped spiritually. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Buddhist practice is aimed primarily at cultivating the antidotes to these afflictive thoughts and emotions, with the goal of eradicating the root of our unenlightened existence to bring about liberation from suffering. — Dalai Lama XIV

Beware At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease — Octavia Butler

How can you possibly be sympathetic to every fool on the planet? Just the other day, I heard a man whining about his hopeless love of cross-dressing. Call me unenlightened, but I started to laugh. — Deacon Jones

Because I do not wish to know," he says. "I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark. — Erin Morgenstern

Most liberal-minded folk would like to think that since they are not hostile to people of a different race, racism is a disease of the uneducated, unenlightened and socially backward - football hooligans, British National Party supporters, policemen. You could call this the Bad Guy Theory. But the Bad Guy Theory does not explain why Indian-heritage children do nearly twice as well as Pakistani-heritage children at GCSE. — Trevor Phillips

If we don't have a clear sense of our identity and purpose, we are much more vulnerable to Lucifer. He of course knows this and accordingly attempts to blur our vision. He lies. He shades and obliterates truth. He makes evil look good and good look unenlightened and unsophisticated. Make no mistake about it: Lucifer will do anything to derail, disappoint, dishearten, discourage, and deceive us - and particularly those who have made and are seeking to keep sacred covenants. His motives are entirely self-centered, selfish, destructive, and evil. — Sheri L. Dew

Others can't stand to revise; instead they decide they're avant-garde, so everybody who doesn't like their work is unenlightened. (Note: being avant-garde is now ... well, garde.) — Mary Karr

I was eighteen when I first read Joseph Heller's stunning work 'Catch-22,' and was at that time close to being drafted for the fruitless and unenlightened war in Viet Nam. — Thomas Steinbeck

There is no separate entity that could be enlightened or unenlightened. There are only innumerable expressions of the One Being (which we call people, animals, forms), mirror-like facets, reflecting being-ness back to itself. — Enza Vita

I admire and respect the tenacity, courage, and patience of the unenlightened in the face of so much overwhelming evidence — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Tarantulas have also received a lot of
bad press in the movies. Many movies
and television programs starring such
noted actors as Sean Connery, The
Three Stooges, Harrison Ford, and
William Shatner, have featured tarantulas
as dangerous to humans or menaces to
civilization. The Tarantula That Ate Tokyo
is a long-standing joke among horrormovie buffs. The fact is that these
movies play with the ignorance and fears
passed on for generations by unenlightened people. Nobody would pay to see
the movie The Beagle That Ate Boston
since everybody knows what a beagle
really is. Few know tarantulas as well. — Stanley A Schultz

The reason why the romantic love relationship is such an intense and universally sought-after experience is that it seems to offer liberation from a deep-seated state of fear, need, lack, and incompleteness that is part of the human condition in its unredeemed and unenlightened state. — Eckhart Tolle

Rise above the limited conditions of pleasure and pain, success and failure, happiness and sorrow, that all the countless unenlightened beings in creation are slaves to. — Frederick Lenz

At physical death man loses his consciousness of the flesh and becomes conscious of his astral body in the astral world. Thus physical death is astral birth. Later, he passes from the consciousness of luminous astral birth to the consciousness of dark astral death and awakens in a new physical body. Thus astral death is physical birth. These recurrent cycles of physical and astral encasements are the ineluctable destiny of all unenlightened men. — Paramahansa Yogananda

About a year before, Kitty and Lydia had embraced CrossFit, the intense strength and conditioning regimen that involved weight lifting, kettle bells, battle ropes, obscure acronyms, the eschewal of most foods other than meat, and a derisive attitude toward the weak and unenlightened masses who still believed that jogging was a sufficient workout and a bagel was an acceptable breakfast. — Curtis Sittenfeld

All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian. — Pat Paulsen

Knowledge of the Enlightenment Cycle, of the ways that inner dimensions and nirvana work, lifts you far above the transient sorrows, pains, pleasures and joys that the unenlightened masses experience. — Frederick Lenz

Immigrant: An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another. — Ambrose Bierce

Still how unenlightened and ignorant are the very nations we term civilized! — Jean-Baptiste Say

I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark." The — Erin Morgenstern

Nineteen twentieths of [mankind is] opaque and unenlightened. Intimacy with most people will make you acquainted with vices and errors and follies enough to make you despise them. — John Adams

I don't see it. It's a backward, primitive, unenlightened place. They don't even have a modern government. It's the worst government in any state. The laziest. It does nothing - outside of keeping law courts and a police department. It doesn't do anything for the people. It doesn't help anybody. I don't see why all our best companies want to run there. The — Ayn Rand

When Pat Buchanan came out against the Beijing Women's Conference and there were women standing next to him, smiling and laughing when he was making fun of it, I was so embarrassed. I don't mind when the more liberal or moderate Republican women talk about smaller government or money issues and things of that nature. But when I see a conservative Republican woman in line with the Christian right or coming out against abortion and day-care issues and for taking away womens' aid, I see a self-hating, unenlightened woman, like a self-hating Jew. That blows my mind. I don't get it at all. — Janeane Garofalo

Accusations are merely the envy of the unenlightened given form. — Brian Farrey

It is much nicer to live in perfect mind, free from pain and agony. How painful it is to be unenlightened. Buddha called it "the nightmare of the day." — Frederick Lenz

No doubt it was "unenlightened" of the crusaders to have been typical medieval warriors, but it seems even more unenlightened to anachronistically impose the Geneva Conventions on the crusaders while pretending that their Islamic opponents were innocent victims. — Rodney Stark

People are given a false alternative: the choice between an unenlightened belief and an enlightened unbelief. Most intellectuals seem to pay homage to the second variant. — Eugen Drewermann

He hung a patient expression on his face, the kind usually seen on people who talked about releasing your anger and surrounding yourself with good feelings while writing off anyone who disagreed with them as unenlightened. — Amy Fecteau

At the individual level, the great controlling myth of our time has been the belief that within each of us there is a real, inner, private 'self', long buried beneath layers of socialization and attempted cultural and religious control, and needing to be rediscovered if we are to live authentic lives. When we 'discover' this 'true authentic self' , we must do whatever it dictates, even if it means ignoring the norms of the 'unenlightened' society all around us. — N. T. Wright

People go to mediums and they get in touch with spirits outside of the body. Most of these spirits are pretty malevolent and unenlightened, although they often claim to be enlightened teachers who are disincarnate. These low-vibe beings seek life-force. — Frederick Lenz

My father believed, like Pericles, that a man's genius could be easily judged by the number of unenlightened fools set in phalanx against his ideas. — Thomas Steinbeck

Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dum, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence. — Tom Robbins

The important graphs are the ones where some things are not connected to some other things. When the unenlightened ones try to be profound, they draw endless verbal comparisons between this topic, and that topic, which is like this, which is like that; until their graph is fully connected and also totally useless. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Listen, Nicole, I've had all I can take of you telling me what I need. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe you're exactly what I need? That maybe, in the middle of all this miserable neck-snapping and repelling and crossing the bloody hell over, all I really want is someone ... someone good who will let me be a fucking man? Just a fucking human being with flaws and unenlightened days? Is that too much to ask? That you let me fucking love you, Nicole? Because that's what I need! That's all I'd ever need from you. Just to love you. Can you deny me that? - Christian Wright (Whisper of Light) — Jennifer DeLucy

Why haven't you asked me how I do my tricks?" Celia asks, once they have reached the point where she is certain he is not simply being polite about the matter. "Because I do not wish to know," he says. "I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better remain in the dark. — Erin Morgenstern